How Labor lost ethnic minority voters

A report published this week reveals some surprising new data about the relationship between the UK’s political parties and the minorities they purport to represent. Research from think tank UK In a Changing Europe provides evidence of how fluid voting habits are becoming and how an increasingly diverse Britain is translating into increasingly diverse loyalties and priorities among minority groups that , themselves, are becoming increasingly divergent.

The relevance of the questions raised by the report could not be more timely; The collapse of Labor votes in areas with particularly large Muslim populations during the Israel-Hamas conflict was a sign of the volatile nature of political loyalty and a warning to all parties not to take the votes of any minority for granted. For politicians smart enough to understand the complexities and nuances of the range of minority voting habits, there are enormous gains to be made.

The Labor Party’s Muslim vote fell a remarkable 28 percent in July. In one of their starkest statements, the report’s authors state: “Among many ethnic groups, there is a fundamental disjunction between opinion on the most important issues of the day and voting patterns. Our polls suggest that Labor support among ethnic minorities is an ossified cultural and historical legacy that could disappear very quickly.”

One of their most surprising findings is that, among ethnic minority voters, “higher education was associated with a greater likelihood of voting Conservative”.

The report concludes that ethnic minority opinion now spans the entire political spectrum. This shouldn’t come as a surprise in itself, but the variations it presents are worth noting. Although in the 2024 general election the combined vote share of Labour, the Greens and the Liberal Democrats was 66 per cent among ethnic minorities, and the UK Conservatives and Reformers only collected 26 per cent, the report identifies very striking differences between the various ethnic minority groups.

“The political, social and economic values ​​of British Indian voters and British Chinese voters, and to a lesser extent black African voters, are structurally different from other minority groups – in particular British Caribbeans and British Muslims,” he says.

Data indicates that Indian and Chinese voters tend to have more right-wing economic views. These groups also have the highest rates of “affection” in relation to conservatives, with Africans being the highest of all. British, Indian and Chinese respondents were most likely to vote Conservative in 2019 – a pattern repeated in 2024. In terms of purely religious determinants, Hindus surveyed in 2019 were more likely to vote Conservative than any other religion (29 percent). When it comes to the economy, Muslim respondents were the most left-leaning (71 percent) and Hindus and Christians were the most right-leaning on economic issues (48 percent).